Dernier Cri helps to grow tens of startups thanks to Scalingo

Dernier Cri: Passion for Innovation

Web agency created in 2014 with offices in Paris, Lille, and Bordeaux, Dernier Cri currently has 41 employees and more than 40 clients since the beginning of 2020.

Robin Komiwes, co-founder of Dernier Cri, is project director with a strong technical aspect. He mainly deals with startup clients and projects with a certain degree of technical complexity.

What drives Dernier Cri's team is digital product innovation. This desire for innovation is used for their clients to drive new business opportunities with high added value.

Dernier Cri is technologically "agnostic", which means that the technology stack is chosen to be the most suitable for their clients' projects. For a SaaS, it will generally be Ruby on Rails. For performance needs, they will turn to Elixir instead. And if there are recruitment concerns, it will be more mainstream technologies like NodeJS.

And this is where the choice of a PaaS takes on its full meaning.

Before Scalingo, a lack of support

At the beginning of Dernier Cri, Robin and his collaborators started using VPS at Digital Ocean and Rackspace.

Isolation with one VPS per client and Docker to help with system administration but it wasn't enough. Between the recurring problems of builds, the sometimes forgotten backups or the lack of recovery plan pushed Robin to look for a better solution.

The choice went to Heroku. Technically the experience was very satisfying but the human side was much less so.

After a few years with Heroku, we were no longer satisfied with the technical support. Instead, we were dealing with sales people who were kindly pushing us to move on to offerings we didn't need.

Looking for a new PaaS

Dernier Cri thus decided to leave again in search of a new solution with a desire to use a French provider this time. Dernier Cri decided to migrate to Scalingo. The support being a real asset.

When you have a buildpack that does not pass. When you can have projects a bit complex. We've already had some guys from your team to help us look at what we can do to improve the buildpack and make sure that our particular architecture can pass. That's the difference.

Another specificity of Scalingo is the use of 3DS Outscale, a subsidiary of Dassault Systèmes, which offers an impression of robustness for Dernier Cri's customers, stresses Robin.

There are still Dernier Cri customers who don't necessarily want to be hosted on a PaaS, but Robin always manages to find an opportunity to make them realize the added value.

A focus on time-to-value with Scalingo

If Dernier Cri had continued to use VPS, it would have required at least 1 or 2 more system administrators, Robin estimates. But today DevOps is one person and that's 20% of his time. And if Dernier Cri encounters a problem, Scalingo's support is there.

Finally, for project management, Review Apps are at the heart of the Dernier Cri process. Essential for the internal recipe, insists Robin, customers have the opportunity to test the latest developments very regularly.

The feature outside of flexibility that’s very important to us is the Review Apps because it’s essential to our process. As soon as you work on a feature, you can show it.

Conclusion

To summarize here are the details of the advantages of Scalingo for Dernier Cri :

• Quality of the technical support. As Robin, founder of Scalingo said, one of the main advantage of Scalingo is the quality of his technical support compared to other Paas.
• The opportunity to work with a european supplier. Scalingo is a Cloud hosting platform based in Strasbourg in the heart of Europe.
• Time Saver. Thanks to Scalingo, Dernier Cri can save 20% of their engineers time as they don't have to care about DevOps!

And you, when will you try Scalingo? Just send us a message and Book a Demo!